Adaptive Path's San Francisco studio library was originally set up by Chiara Ogan, and when she left last year, she entrusted it to me. Among Chiara's many talents, she's a trained and experienced librarian, and she set up a complete library system about which she blogged in December of 2010, when we were at our Brannan Street location.
I'm not a trained librarian, but I am a compulsive classifier and organizer*, so I jumped at the chance to run our library. In a nutshell, the SF library is a lending library with a traditional yet super simple self-checkout process that lets people borrow books pretty much indefinitely. We label and cover books just like real libraries do, and we use the Library of Congress system to organize the books on our shelves and in our electronic catalog. Want to check something out? Easy. Just write your name on the standard library card in the back of the book, add the date, and drop the card into the checkout box.
The AP Library in 2012
One thing that’s changed since we moved into our current studio along San Francisco’s waterfront is that we now enjoy a wonderfully open space for our library. Books line the built-in shelves, and a dedicated reading area provides a place to enjoy a book, flip through the pages of the latest periodicals, or pose for photographs.
The Adaptive Path SF studio library and its seating area are open to the rest of the office. We walk by it several times a day and often stop in to read or share ideas.
Smart UX managers deliver better experiences and better revenue. That's their job.
At the heart of this year's MX Conference was a talk by Hotwire Group's head of mobile, Melissa Matross. Her story starts with her hatred of display ads and how they took away from the quality of the Hotwire experience as a “necessary evil.”
Knowing her frustration with the ads, her boss challenged Melissa saying, “If you want to get rid of the ads, find a way to replace the revenue.” This was the opening that Melissa says changed her career.
Before her story's done, you hear how she found revenue, dramatically improved the experience and Hotwire's brand impression, and ignited her career:
Melissa Matross | Better Revenue through UX: Bringing Down the Banners the Hotwire Way
Not all of Britain is preparing for the Olympics. Check out the UK Government's shiny new design principles.
Why line up for a grand opening when you could use Twitter, or maybe taskrabbit.
We have no idea what this means for interaction design, but we're sure someone will write an O'Reilly book on how to design for 'levitated interaction'.
Every March for the past six years, our MX: Managing Experience conference has brought together a growing community of managers, directors, and VPs of experience design teams (and their bosses) to discuss the unique challenges they face.
This year's sold out conference featured speakers from GE, eBay, Intel, Flickr, Salesforce.com, Sony, and Forrester Research, representing an excellent mix of examples of the role experience design is playing in the world's largest companies. This year's talks explored a range of topics from the journey to becoming a UX leader, to how design is used in tandem with user experience to drive revenue, and to what challenges and opportunities lie in the years ahead.
Last Thursday, April 5th, we capped off our four day UX Intensive training with the Service Design day. Jamin Hegemen lead the activity-packed day, introducing principles and methods designed to help organizations orchestrate cohesive cross-channel experiences for products and services. Just a couple of the highlights included developing service blueprints and mapping customer journeys. Much fun was had in the service prototyping portion, as participants used acting as a means of prototyping service experiences.
After two days of fast-paced learning and making at our UX Intensive in Amsterdam, our attendees jumped into the deep end of Interaction Design. Chris Risdon used every minute of the day to pack in valuable concepts and useful tools that we use at Adaptive Path to quickly identify a large number of ideas and then turn the best ones into successful products and services. Here's a few highlights from the day:
Continuing our coverage of UX Intensive Amsterdam, day two featured Design Research (see Day 1: Design Strategy here) taught by Paula Wellings.
Paula led the group from start to finish on defining research goals and objectives, methods to collect and analyze data, and how to effectively communicate findings to clients and stakeholders in order to move research toward design.
As the daughter of an Emergency Room doctor and nurse who wanted me to follow their lead into medicine, I had a somewhat unusual childhood. I experienced my first human dissection at age eleven and treated a simulated cerebral aneurysm before I could drive. While I was being molded into the future Dr. Valentine through every “doctor camp” offered in North America, I was taking mail-order art classes and attempting to sell my masterpieces in a local restaurant. I was expected to become a doctor, but my true passion lay in making things.
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